ASP.NET Versions

This blog compares the various versions of ASP.NET since its evolution and provides an outlook to some of their key features including the latest version of ASP.NET 4.5.

Introduction:

This blog compares the various versions of ASP.NET since its evolution and provides an outlook to some of their key features including the latest version of ASP.NET 4.5.

ASP.NET 4.5: Changes made to core Runtime and Framework: Some key features are -

• Asynchronous reading and writing HTTP requests and responses.
   
• Improvements to HttpRequests handling
   
• Asynchronous HttpModules and HttpHandlers
   
• Strongly Typed Data Controls
   
• Javascript Editor
   
• Performance improvement for Web Hosting

ASP.NET 4.0: New Features like:

• Browser Detection Updated: Updated browser definition files i.e. server side engine can recognize some of the latest browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Mobile browsers, etc.
   
• Session State Compression: Enables the gzip compression of the data passed to an out of process session state service.
   
• Opt in View State: Turn of the View state for entire page and then optionally Opt in for specific controls you want.
   
• Extensible Caching: Some new types of cache storage exposed like distributed caching solutions such as Windows Server AppFabric, etc.
   
• The Chart Control: Supports a range of 2D and 3D graphs
   
• ASP.NET MVC: Offers different way to build web pages. Some advantages over web form model are: Test Driven development, Control over HTML markup, control over urls.
   
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data: A template based, componentized, a customizable framework to quickly build a data driven application.
   
• SilverLight: To create richer pages like providing 2D graphics, animations, etc.
   
• Consistent XHTML Rendering: ASP.NET 4.0 smooth out rendering of ASP.NET web pages as XHTML documents.

ASP.NET 3.5: Support of LINQ in ASP.NET like binding the results of LINQ to Data Source Controls

ASP.NET AJAX

ASP.NET 3.0: No Changes

ASP.NET 2.0: Added new features like:

• Master Pages
• Themes
• Navigation controls
• Security and Memberships
• Data Source Controls
• Web Parts
• Profiles

ASP.NET 1.0/1.1: Introduction of Web Form Model - ASP.NET initiates the Page object and then instantiates various ASP.NET control objects that goes through the ASP.NET page life cycle